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Monday, 19 September 2011

There is no spoon

Or 'Why I hate project management, part 3'...

I’m working on a complex project that will impact many systems. I’ve spent months gathering info from various system owners and developers. Right at the start the owner of System X told me that this would not impact his system, there is no dev work required, no config, no data mapping, nothing. He has declined to participate in any of the tech team meetings ever since.

In the tech meetings for the project, the various other system owners have all told me that System X will need *a lot* of work to implement this project. Everything depends on System X. There will be massive amounts of data verification, mapping and conversion in System X for this project to work.

I went back to the owner and the developer for System X and asked them if they were really, really sure there was no work for them to do. I explained what we were trying to do and how important it was.

The developer got back right away and said, ‘don’t worry. Everything’s mapped to [the thing we’re trying to eliminate]’.

So I wrote back and said ‘if it’s mapped there, it will need to be remapped elsewhere as that is the whole purpose of this project’.

The system owner responded right away. ‘Nothing is mapped to [the thing we’re trying to eliminate] or to [the thing we’re replacing it with]. There is no mapping’.

That’s great. I’m going to document everything and keep the e-mail trail, but somehow when it all goes wrong, I will still be the one who looks like an idiot.

This same system owner caused me grief last week as well. I was trying to get dev names for all the impacted systems. I was in a meeting with a bunch of people who told me to get a dev contact for System X. I had an e-mail from this guy telling me who the contact was. I stated it in the meeting. Everybody laughed. Surely I misunderstood, they said. He doesn’t work on X; he only works on Y.

I replied to the system owner using the same e-mail in which he told me the name of the contact for System X and said that everybody had laughed.

‘NO!’ he said. ‘He is not to work on System X. He works only on System Y’.